Staughton and Alice Lynd are two extraordinary activists still busy doing good in their 80s. More than five decades ago, Staughton was teaching history at Yale, publishing and progressing steadily toward tenure, but his activism was getting in the way. It might have been acceptable to have been a member of SNCC and a key organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Summer.

Staughton, in t-shirt, training MFS participants.

When Lynd joined Bob Moses and Dave Dellinger in organizing the first anti-Vietnam War protest in D.C.,

Dellinger, Lynd and Moses, spattered with cow's blood for dramatic effect, march on the Pentagon.

that was too much for Yale. They booted him and blacklisted him elsewhere in the academic world. Staughton and Alice took it as an opportunity to enhance their service of others. They went to the University of Chicago Law School, and when they graduated, began doing legal aid work in industrial Youngstown, Ohio.

In the decades since, the couple has organized workers, fought for prisoners' rights and constantly sought to serve their fellow human beings through activism. A few years back, Chris Hedges wrote a nice piece chronicling some of their good works and philosophy of activism.

I've had the privilege of hearing the Lynds speak several times in the past few years. They still accept local speaking engagements, their only request being that someone provide them transportation since driving in their 80s has become more difficult. While each of these occasions has deeply affected me, the most powerful took place when Staughton and Alice attended an IWW meeting held at the Society of Friends house in the area. We held our meeting first, before their speaking and Q&A session.

During the Q&A, someone asked Staughton to comment on our meeting and all our marvelous ideas. Lynd responded by saying that we were not likely to enjoy what he had to say. He admitted that he had always been troubled by the formalism of IWW meetings; that's why he had never joined the Wobs even though he had been a keynote speaker at a recent convention. All those motions and objections and amendments and votes were offputting to him, a substitute for real democratic, consensus decision-making as far as he was concerned.

He then proceeded to give us an example of another kind of organiztion by telling us a story. Bob Moses and he were at Antioch College in Ohio, training Mississippi Freedom Summer participants, when they heard that James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had gone missing. How would they respond? Could an effort be mounted to find the missing civil rights workers? Would they cease sending more trainees to Mississippi in face of likely violence? The group didn't call a meeting to order. They didn't make motions or offer amendments. They gathered in a circle, joined hands, closed their eyes and sang "Kumbaya." (Staughton then digressed into his anger every time some talking head like Tom Brokaw mocks "Kumbaya" as an example of foolish, naive thinking.) After singing together, people began to speak up, one after another about what they would do. The trainees insisted on still going to Mississippi. Stokely Carmichael volunteered to lead a small group to Mississippi to search "through the backwoods" for their missing comrades. Bob Moses said he would call some politicians and lawyers for support. Task by task, commitment by commitment, the group responded to devastating news. When Staughton was finished, tears were in his eyes, the shock and horror and strength and solidarity of those moments still powerful in his heart. Alice saw his distress and gently squeezed his thigh until he recovered.

Lynd's critique of our head-dominated approach to the work of the IWW should not be surprising. He has always advocated for a spiritual element in activist work on the Left. In Wobblies and Zapatistas, Lynd comments on his own personal striving to merge his own spirituality with his Leftist politics:

The project of achieving the Good Society, of bringing in the Kingdom of God, of realizing in practice that Other World that is possible, has both subjective and objective components. For myself, as for liberation theologians, Marxism provides the needed objective analysis. But Marxism is inadequate as a guide to practice, to personal decisions. For that one must turn to the efforts over the centuries to live the good life here and now exemplified by small religious communities.

I say this with conviction because I have experienced it. When my wife and I lived at the Macedonia Cooperative Community, I would get up at 5 a.m. to do the morning milking, and stumble out into the dark and cold with my wool hat pulled above one ear so as to hear the cow bells. At length the cows roused themselves and I trailed after them toward the cow barn. At these times, as the sun began to emerge over the line of hills that surrounded our mountain valley, I felt that everything I could see as the morning flooded in was part of a good way of life that my wife and I were building up together with our companions. The memory stayed with me when, later on, Alice and I felt obliged once again to journey into the hard, cruel, outside capitalist world, and tried to bring change about on a larger scale. I am not the only one to have felt the need for such support and subjective inspiration. Tom Paine is perhaps the single greatest revolutionary we can recall in the English-speaking world on both sides of the Atlantic. He died in New York City in 1809. In his Will he wrote:

"I know not if the Society of people called Quakers, admit a person to be buried in their burying ground, who does not belong to their Society, but if they do, or will admit me, I would prefer being buried there; my father belonged to that profession, and I was partly brought up in it."

For a variety of historical reasons, spirituality is a topic with which many are uncomfortable on the Left, but as we watch impotently a world turning hard right around us, we need to find a way to put aside that discomfort in a renewed search for a spiritual core to what we're about. It certainly need not be Christian or even theistic, but we are clearly foundering without a spiritual basis for our work together.